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Robert Dodge: A 'jobs program' to end humanity

Ventura
Published 11:02 a.m. PT Nov. 5, 2016

The plume of smoke from a mushroom cloud billow, about one hour after the nuclear bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945. Two planes participated in this mission; the Enola Gay carried and dropped the weapon, and another was an escort. Estimates vary, but about 140,000 people are believed to have died in the nuclear blast. (AP Photo/U.S. Army via Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum)

Nuclear weapons present the greatest public health and existential threat to our survival every moment of every day. Yet the United States and other nuclear nations stand in breach of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which commits them to work in good faith to end the arms race and achieve nuclear disarmament.

Now, 48 years later, the efforts of the nuclear nations toward this goal are not evident, and the world is as dangerous as it was during the height of the Cold War and arguably more dangerous with current scientific evidence on the catastrophic effects of even limited regional nuclear war.

This year’s presidential campaign has once again done little to focus on the dangers of nuclear weapons, focusing more on who has the temperament to have their finger on the button with absolutely no indication of any understanding of the consequences to all of humanity by the use of these weapons, even on a very small scale. In addition to tensions between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine and Syria, there is a real danger of nuclear war in South Asia, which could kill more than 2 billion people from the use of just 100 Hiroshima-size weapons.

The rest of the world is finally standing up to this threat to survival. They are taking matters into their own hands and refusing to be held hostage by the nuclear nations. They will no longer be bullied into sitting back and waiting for the nuclear states to make good on empty promises.

At the United Nations this past month, 123 nations voted to commence negotiations next year on a new treaty to prohibit the possession of nuclear weapons. Despite President Obama’s 2009 pledge to seek the security of a world free of nuclear weapons, the U.S. voted no and led the opposition to this treaty.

Rather than meet our obligations under international law, the U.S has proposed to begin a new nuclear arms race, spending $1 trillion over the next 30 years to modernize and rebuild every aspect of our nuclear weapons programs — a "jobs program" to end humanity. Each of the nuclear nations is expected to do the same, continuing the arms race for generations to come.

The myth of deterrence is the guise for this effort. In fact, deterrence is the main driver of the arms race. For every additional weapon my adversary has, I need two, and so on and so on to our global arsenals of 15,500 weapons.

Fed up with this inaction and doublespeak, the non-nuclear nations have joined the ongoing effort to end the madness. Led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (a global partnership of 440 partners in 98 countries), the International Red Cross, associations representing more than 17 million health professionals worldwide, and religious communities including the Catholic Church and World Council of Churches, they are calling for a treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.

The effort has several parallels to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which was dismissed as utopian by most governments when launched in 1992 but succeeded in 1997 through partnerships, public imagination and political pressure.

Unfortunately, nuclear weapons and control systems are imperfect. During the Cold War, there were many instances where the world came perilously close to nuclear war. It is a matter of sheer luck that this scenario did not come to pass, by design or accident. Our luck will not hold out forever.

From a medical and public health stance, based on our current evidence-based understanding of what nuclear weapons can actually do, any argument for continued possession of these weapons by anyone is untenable and defies logic. There is absolutely no reasonable or adequate medical response to nuclear war.

With any public health threat — from Zika and Ebola to polio and HIV — prevention is the goal. The global threat from nuclear weapons is no different. The only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons is to ban and eliminate them. Our future depends upon this.

President Kennedy, speaking on nuclear weapons before the U.N. Security Council in September 1961, said, “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” Our children's children will look back and rightly ask why we — the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons — remained on the wrong side of history when it came to abolishing them.

Robert Dodge, a family physician in Ventura, serves on the boards of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions.